G13’s Project Room series, established in 2016, is a platform to promote younger artists. Liew’s Invisible Cities is the 11th show in this series.

“I’m looking at the way everyday life flows … how people deal with togetherness, parting, sadness and anxiety,” says Liew, a fine art graduate from KL’s Dasein Academy Of Art.

She admits most of the works have some sort of personal connection or experience.

“I’m a very negative person,” she shares, alluding to a difficult episode during her childhood.

Where Are You Heading (paper, print, gloss gel and acrylic on canvas, 2017).

“We are who we are now because of our past experiences. But some things may remain unresolved and this is what traps us, such memories and trauma.”

In this exhibition, Liew takes to the canvas to figure out how to give life to these blurred out or faceless people, all of whom seem stuck in anonymous, superficial and transitory routines, especially with the stereotypical backdrop of urban living.

In the The Lost Of The City II, she paints a busy street scene, but strangely, you can’t feel the bustle.

Instead, the work captures a group of strangers, each one of them lost in their own thoughts and worlds. If you look closer, the destroyed images and the fence behind them seem to speak about a certain emptiness.

Invisible Cities isn’t the happiest exhibition in terms of themes.

However, there might still be optimism in these works. Liew doesn’t discount that.

“Through the broken images and surfaces, I attempted to present (the notion of) loneliness and helplessness. It also suggests life mending (itself) within the framework of arranging, taking away and rearranging.” concludes Liew, wistfully.